Berkowitz's debut novelFamily Matters, published in 2006, won the Washington Irving Award for Literary Merit,[1] and was a USAToday Top Ten Summer Read selection.[2] He followed up with his second Washington Irving Award for his novel, Old Flame published in 2008.[3]

The third novel in the Jackson Steeg series, Sinners' Ball published in December 2009.,[4] won the Shamus Award for Best Original Paperback Crime Fiction Novel of 2009.[5]

Contents

Ira Berkowitz’s path to writing fiction took thirty years to complete. Growing up in Brooklyn, Berkowitz dreamed of a career in medicine or law. But advertising beckoned. When he retired, he began to write. His first attempt at a novel garnered fifty rejections. A few were encouraging. So, he kept at it.

Berkowitz’s novels explore the themes of family, loyalty, and asymmetrical justice – an all too familiar condition where the cards are stacked against the weak.

His novels are set in Hell's Kitchen, a gentrifying neighborhood with a bloody, sordid past. It is as much a major character in the series as Jackson Steeg, an alcoholic ex-NYPD Homicide Detective. Although he mourns the changes in the neighborhood he loves, Steeg knows a simple truth: No matter how much sheen and glitz is slathered on Hell’s Kitchen, crime will always thrive in its cracks and crevasses.